alterity

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. Otherness; the entity in contrast to which an identity is constructed.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. The state or quality of being other; a being otherwise.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. The state or quality of being other or different.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Examples

Ward contends that sameness, not alterity, is the primary force that consolidated a cohesive British identity by psychologically binding Britain with its white settler communities across the globe (245).

Indeed, my hermeneutic principles, which insist that any notion of alterity is inevitably determined by reference to the subject who constructs it and thus by reference to our present, forbid me to imagine, let alone to lobby for, any such transcendental object of historical knowledge and desire.

Sha's criticism of the fetishization of alterity is a familiar theme in the history of hermeneutics; Paul Ricoeur, for example, describes the "illusion ... that puts an end to our collusion with the past and creates a situation comparable to the objectivity of the natural sciences, on the grounds that a loss of familiarity is a break with the contingent" (74).

He has thus refined his notion of alterity from a "priggish" one that would not acknowledge any resemblance (14) between ancient paederasty and modern homosexuality, to an alterity that now "acknowledge [s], promote [s], and support [s] a heterogeneity of queer identities, past and present"